Indian Museums Against Climate Change
Indian Museums Against Climate Change is the organization’s attempt at making the Indian museum sector cleaner, greener and more sustainable. IMACC is the Indian local hub of Culture Declares Emergency, which is a growing global movement of people in arts and culture who believe that the cultural sector can take the lead in creating a regenerative future that protects the planet.
ReReeti is spearheading the programme to combat this crisis by working with museums to implement the following three-step approach:
- Work with museums to guide them in exploring climate change through their collections and the histories they tell. Museums under IMACC are also declaring the ways in which they are fighting climate change through practices within the organization’s operations.
- Collaborate with museums to support institutional initiatives. Capacity-building workshops for museum professionals to train them in methods of fighting climate change are arranged regularly.
- Host quarterly meetups with the museums to evaluate IMACC’s progress and discuss the next steps. We are constantly working on enabling dialogue and expression amidst our communities about how the Emergency will affect them and the changes that are needed.
The 9 Indian Museums that are included in this initiative for 2023 are as follows:
Workshops
We are constantly engaging with the member museums through workshops facilitated by experts in the industry and quarterly meetups to discuss and measure our work so far. These workshops are open only to the staff members of our member museums.
However, we post key learnings from the workshops on our social media for our entire museum community to see.
Through our first interactive workshop “Putting an eco-lens on museum collections” facilitated by Climate Museum UK, museums learnt how to find links between their museum objects and ecology and further interpret their findings. Over the past few months, the museums have been practising looking at their collections through an ‘eco-lens’ and sharing that information on social media, giving our collective audiences a deeper insight.
In our second workshop named “My Waste, My Responsibility” facilitated by Subbaiah TS of Urban Morph, we explored 2 main areas of change: i) How museums can reduce the waste they produce and ii) Quick and easy sustainable practices to become environmentally-friendly institutions. Post the workshop, our member museums have begun implementing the learnings and we are measuring this impact regularly.
Testimonials
DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum
Muthukadu, Tamil Nadu
Currently, we have taken small steps by powering our newly built education building and gallery with solar energy. Three water purifiers are installed in the campus and water dispensers are made available at various locations across our museum to encourage visitors to carry their own water bottles. An air-to-water converted system is installed at our entrance that transforms the humidity in the air to drinking water.
Indian Music Experience Museum
Bengaluru, Karnataka
Since the second workshop, we have implemented a few changes to reduce the use of single-use plastics within the museum premises. We have banned the sale of plastic water bottles and intend to install water dispensers. We have copper bottles and tumblers placed backstage and on stage for artists. Plastic packaging will be replaced with boxed lunches for children visitors, and they will be served a drink in steel tumblers.
Museo Camera
Gurgaon, Haryana
Post the waste management workshop conducted by you all last month, we have initiated weekly training of all staff members on the segregation system. Despite following segregation over the last 2.5 years we did have waste streams getting mixed up. With the weekly training + new system of marking the various segregation bins we hope to achieve 100% segregation at source. All the segregated waste is taken to Samadhaan hub in Gurgaon.